Long before the military convoy arrived in the muggy town of Dara Lam, news of the meeting between the U.S. Army colonel and the unpopular governor of the Kirsham province had seeped into social media.¹ Angry with the American presence and the governor’s corruption, local citizens organized for a demonstration. Their trending hashtag—#justice4all—soon drew the attention of international media and the online world, trending in popularity. It also drew the eyes of some less interested in justice: the notorious Fariq terror network. Using sockpuppet accounts and bots to steer the course of online and real world sentiment, the terrorists fanned the flames, calling for the protesters to confront the American occupiers.

But this wasn’t the full extent of Fariq’s plan. Knowing where a massive crowd of civilians would soon gather, the terrorists also set an ambush. Their plan was to fire on the U.S. soldiers as they exited the building, and, if the soldiers fired back, the demonstrators would be caught in the crossfire. Pre-positioned cameramen stood ready to record the bloody outcome: either dead Americans or dead civilians. A network of online proxies was then prepared to drive the event to virality and use it for future propaganda and recruiting. Whatever the physical outcome, the insurgents would win this battle.

Luckily, other eyes were tracking the flurry of activity online: those of a U.S. Army brigade’s tactical operations center. The center’s task was to monitor the environment in which its soldiers operated, whether the battlespace was dense cities, isolated mountain ranges, or, now, clusters of social media influencers. The fast-moving online developments were detected and then immediately passed up the chain of command. A generation earlier, the officers might have discounted what was playing out online as mere internet chatter, but now they understood its importance. Receiving word of the protest’s growing strength and fury, the colonel cut his meeting short and left discreetly through a back entrance. Fariq’s plan was thwarted.

Try as you might, you won’t find any record of this event in the news—and it is not because it takes place in the distant year of 2030. It is because Dara Lam is a fake settlement in a fake province of a fake country, one that endures a fake war that breaks out every few months in the very real state of Louisiana.

The Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk holds a special place in military history. It was created as part of the Louisiana Maneuvers, a series of massive training exercises held just before the United States entered World War II. When Hitler and his blitzkrieg rolled over Europe, the U.S. Army realized warfare was operating by a new set of rules. It had to figure out how to transition from a world of horses and telegraphs to one of mechanized tanks and trucks guided by wireless communications. It was at Fort Polk that American soldiers, including such legendary figures as Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton, learned how to fight in a way that would preserve the free world.

Since then, Fort Polk has served as a continuous field laboratory where the Army trains for tomorrow’s battles. During the Cold War, it was used to prepare for feared clashes with the Soviet Red Army and then to acclimatize troops to the jungles of Vietnam. After 9/11, the 72,000-acre site was transformed into the province of Kirsham, replete with twelve plywood villages, an opposing force of simulated insurgents, and scores of full-time actors playing civilians caught in the middle. In short, everything the Army thought it needed to simulate how war was changing. Today, Fort Polk boasts a brand-new innovation for this task: SMEIR.²

Short for Social Media Environment and Internet Replication, SMEIR simulates the blogs, news outlets, and social media accounts that intertwine to form a virtual battlefield atop the physical one. A team of defense contractors and military officers create a version of the internet activity of a small city—rambling posts, innocuous tweets, and the occasional bit of viral propaganda—challenging the troops fighting in the Kirsham counterinsurgency to navigate the new digital terrain. For the stressed, exhausted soldiers dodging enemy IEDs and bullets, it is not enough to safeguard the local population and fight the evil insurgents; they must also now be mindful of the ebb and flow of online conversation.

The project illustrates just how rapid –and surreal—technology change can be for military training and the broader political environment. A generation ago, the internet was a niche plaything—one that the U.S. military itself had literally just walked away from, handing off control to a global consortium of volunteers. Only the most far-sighted futurists at RAND were suggesting that it might one day become a crucial battlefield.³ None imagined that the military in that future would have to pay millions of dollars to simulate a second, fake internet to train for war on the real one.⁴

In this way, what played out at Fort Polk serves not just as a training moment, but a warning for those wrestling to understand the future of war. Despite hopes to the contrary, there will likely be a consistent need to prepare for insurgency, not just because of the continuing issues of failed states and collapsed governance, but the likelihood that, as in the Cold War, great power competition could express itself through proxy warfare.⁵ Yet while the essence of insurgency—a rebellion against authority that targets the effectiveness and legitimacy of the pillars of society⁶—remains the same, advances in science and knowledge can reshape it. Just as new technologies can change the society within which insurgency takes place, they can also introduce key shifts in everything from tactics used in battle to the overall dynamics of the conflict itself.

The following report will first explore the technologic change that looms in the years leading toward 2030 and beyond, and then propose a series of their potential implications for counterinsurgency.

When modern U.S. counterinsurgency strategy was first codified in 1962 under the idea of “Overseas Internal Defense Policy,”⁷ it was typed out on a machine that had no digital components. Computers were just used as massive calculators for a small number of government agencies and businesses. Personal communications devices were little-changed versions of the telephone developed by Alexander Graham Bell almost a century earlier—hard wired into your office or home. The internet wouldn’t even be conceived for another year (in a memo written by J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, who first described it as the “Intergalactic Computer Network”),⁸ while the first mobile telephone wouldn’t be invented until 1973 (and even then, the three-pound Motorola monstrosity wouldn’t go on sale for another decade, for the modest price, in today’s dollars, of $10,000).⁹ As we see in everything from the fictional training at Dara Lam to ISIS’s all too real rise and recruiting through its deft use of social media, these technologies have since proven crucial to the story of modern insurgency.¹⁰

In weighing the potential impact of technology on insurgency moving forward, we should similarly seek to identify the technologies that will truly matter in a manner like the computer and its networking. That is, our focus should not be on mere evolutionary improvements, such as a gun that shoots a bit faster or a missile that goes slightly further, but the technologies that truly change the game. These go by various catchphrases. A generation ago in the Pentagon, “revolutionary” was the popular term.¹¹ Today, the buzzword is “disruptive.” Ironically, outside the military, the descriptor is “killer app.” Whatever the term, think of these next important technologies as akin to the steam engine in 1820s or the airplane in 1920s or the computer in 1980s. They are real, and will change the world, but haven’t yet.

There is an important warning, however. What make them revolutionary, is not the mistaken belief they somehow magically will solve all our problems or lift the fog of war.¹² Thinking like that is exactly what can lead one to absurd optimism and terrible errors, especially about war and insurgency.¹³

Rather, it is the opposite. What truly defines the revolutionary game-changers is that they are technologies that present new questions, for which we don’t have the answers to. These are questions of two types: First, they introduce issues of “What is possible that wasn’t possible just a generation before?” And, secondly, they raise new issues of “What is proper, in issues of right and wrong, that we weren’t wrestling with before?” These may be new questions of the proper way to recruit, organize, or train. Or, they might be new issues of law and ethics that were recently the stuff of science fiction.

A few years back, I helped develop a project for the Pentagon called NeXTech,¹⁴ where we conducted research to answer just what were the pending technologies that might have this effect? That is, what were the technologies of today that were in that potential parallel position to the computer in 1980?

We interviewed a diverse set of subject matter experts, who ranged from people working at places like DARPA and ONR, to university research labs, to experts in industry, ranging from defense contractors to Silicon Valley firms like Apple, Google, and Facebook. They helped us identify that the looming change was not about any single one technology, but rather a cluster of new technology areas. From the hardware of robotics to the wetware of human performance enhancements, these technology clusters are poised to change the landscape of both what is viewed as possible and proper, including for war and insurgency.

In our lifetime, robots, arguably the most celebrated of science fiction technologies, have finally become reality. The U.S. military force that went into Afghanistan after the 2001 attacks used zero robotic systems; now the force has over 22,000 in its inventory, while civilian drones are being used everywhere from agriculture to real estate.¹⁵

Moving forward, we will see even more automation. Increasingly autonomous robotics will come in two primary forms, each of which mimics intelligence in nature. The first are where the intelligence is centralized, such that the task is done directly. In robotics, these tend to be large-scale systems that mimic or directly replace human tasks, such as driverless cars, planes, etc. And then there are systems where the intelligence and resulting tasks are decentralized. They work via networks, akin to insects, allowing the tasks to be disaggregated into parts, but also operating via “swarms” in mass scale.¹⁶

The changes brought on by both types will be incredibly disruptive to both war and work. An Oxford University examination of 702 different jobs found that 47 percent of total U.S. employment is at risk for replacement or reduction by automation within our lifetime.¹⁷ It will hit developing world economies, which support often fragile politics, even harder. As just one illustration, according to International Labour Organization estimates, over 137 million salaried workers in just the five states of Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam are “at high risk of being replaced by machines.”¹⁸

This points to an important impact of a true technology change: It affects society on multiple levels and issue areas. Relevant to robotics, we should thus expect a double effect. Technology that simulates and replaces humans will alter not just the various roles that humans play in insurgency, but will maybe even spark the kind of anger and unrest that festers into it.¹⁹

There are also major changes in what runs and connects our technology, software, and internet it is now bound within. The rise of the “network of networks” has so shaped insurgency that a group like ISIS is literally a creature of the modern internet,²⁰ both recruiting through it and operating on it.

Yet, the internet itself is changing as it moves into its second half-century of life, and not just by bringing the second half of the world’s population online (importantly in many of the areas most fragile and susceptible to mass violence). The internet is shifting from being about communications between human beings (already disruptive enough to everything from our wars to our economy to our dating lives) to running the systems of our increasingly digital world. Roughly 10 billion devices are online now. In the next five years, the number of networked devices is estimated to reach 64 billion, reflecting over $3 trillion in annual spending.²¹ But most of these new contact points will shift from being computers on our desks and smart phones in our pockets to “things” like cars, thermostats, power plants, etc.

This massive growth won’t just empower the internet economy to new spaces, but also massively grow the attack surface—the potential points of vulnerability that cyber threats will go after. However, it will also be a bit like traveling back in time, in that the new growth in the “Internet of Things” (IoT) is replicating all the old cyber security problems. With responsibilities for security unclear, and almost no regulation or even basic liability, all too often these devices lack even basic security features, while customers are largely unaware of what they can and should do. The result is that up to 70 percent of IoT devices have known vulnerabilities,²² and they have already become a key part of botnets.²³

The shift to the things connecting and run by the internet will play out simultaneous to another core shift: How the sharing of files, records, and knowledge on it works. This emergent wave is of distributed ledgers using blockchain and other such technologies. Already, its impact has been felt in areas like finance, where cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have created a new form of money and the transfer of value. Yet, the model of peer-to-peer distribution may lead to even greater change as it is applied across fields and into recordkeeping. It may even lead to a fundamental reorder of the web, as Chris Meserole and Alina Polyakova put it in Foreign Policy magazine, “outside the control of major corporations and states,”²⁴ thus empowering weaker and nonstate actors. Or, like in other spaces of the web, it may prove to be another means for authoritarian states to exert control, such as through China’s recent efforts targeting blockchain developers.²⁵ The very fact that both are in the potential future illustrates the shift at hand.

Yet, the shift in the internet itself might be minuscule in its impact compared to what is about to play out in the intelligence of the software that runs through all of it. In Chinese military thinking, the significance is described as the shift in societies—and their wars—from industrialization of the last century to informatization of the turn of this century to a looming “intelligentization.”²⁶

The field of “Artificial Intelligence” encompasses work on everything from machine learning to neural networks. Arguably no other technology area is seeing as much energy and investment. At this time, there is roughly $153 billion in spending in this space, “with an estimated annual creative disruption impact of $14-33 Trillion.”²⁷ Its participants include all the leading governments of the world, who are engaged in what is increasingly referred to as an “AI arms race.”

This arms race, though, is unlike those in the past in that its participants go beyond competing nations. AI is the focus of a massive scale of industrial spending, poised to hit $79.2 billion by 2022 at a compound annual growth rate of 38 percent.²⁸ Its participants include not just tech firms, but also more traditional business corporations looking to survive the next generation. For example, both John Deere and McDonalds have each respectively spent over $300 million buying AI startups to weave into their business.²⁹

Indeed, of companies listed on the stock market, 244 list AI³⁰ as a centerpiece of their future business plans (a figure gathered by an algorithm sifting through earnings calls). This field is also the obsession of the majority of new entrants to the marketplace, who hope to make the next great fortunes. The founder of Wired magazine described today’s boom in Silicon Valley start-up companies, who will shape tomorrow, as follows: “AI is already here, it’s real, it’s quickening … I think the formula for the next 10,000 start-ups is to take something that already exists and add AI to it.”³¹

As thought leaders and business luminaries from around the world wrestle with how important this development will be, it seems as if they cannot overstate its significance. Masayoshi Son, the founder of the mega-conglomerate Softbank, frames it this way:

"Every industry that mankind created will be redefined. The medical industry, automobile industry, the information industry of course. Every industry that mankind ever defined and created, even agriculture, will be redefined. Because the tools that we created were inferior to mankind's brain in the past. Now the tools become smarter than mankind ourselves. The definition of whatever the industry, will be redefined."³²

Baratunde Thurston, a Director’s Fellow at MIT’s Media Lab, thinks even this massive claim is actually an understatement, in that it just focuses on business: “Every area of life will be affected. Every. Single. One.”³³ Insurgency, of course, falls within this categorization.

Yet there is another historic change afoot in technology. Software and Hardware are technology that we use. “Wetware,” or, more technically, “human performance modification,” is about using technology to change us. Think of this as akin to the science fiction of Iron Man and Captain America crossed with the Russian Olympic athlete program.

We are seeing revolutions in a field that extends from medicine to synthetic biology—a new field that encompasses revolutions ranging from genome editing like CRISPR to biologic computers.³⁴ In this space, discoveries and breakthroughs are outpacing the IT field standard of “Moore’s Law.” They are rewriting what has been possible or not in the literal history of our species, altering everything from susceptibility to disease to body endurance to the workings of the brain itself.³⁵

In turn, new technologies in brain machine interface will rewrite the entire history of how humans have connected to their tools.

In turn, new technologies in brain machine interface will rewrite the entire history of how humans have connected to their tools. From the first stone to the drone and iPhone, we have used our monkey fingers. This is already being challenged by technologies that have allowed test subjects to thought-control advanced technologies like aircrafts³⁶ to conduct database queries and process product orders without ever writing or vocalizing it, which is known as “telepathy tech.”³⁷

There are a variety of other technology areas that could bode to be as disruptive as the above three. For instance, we are seeing both new forms of energy generation and storage come onto line or become distributed in new ways. These could shift everything from geopolitics (how much we care about insurgencies is often determined by their proximity to key energy resources that we’ve become dependent on due to technology changes) to battlefield logistics. They could redefine the roles and purpose of already revolutionary systems. For instance, an autonomous drone is game-changing enough as a plane; an autonomous drone that uses a mix of solar and hydrogen to stay in the air for 12 months³⁸ perhaps ought to be understood as something else, as it now has attributes more like a space satellite than a plane.

Indeed, the fact that so many of these new technologies cross and shape each other is maybe what is the most exciting and game-changing of their prospects (in military terms, the parallel would be how the German blitzkrieg derived from the operational blending together of tanks, planes, and radio). For example, Direct Digital Manufacturing, popularly known as “3D printing,” turns a bit, a computer design, into an atom, a created thing. It is a story of both hardware and software. It also holds the promise of potentially altering fundamental business models. It could do to defense firms what the iPod did to the music industry, absolutely changing not just profit margins, but profit model itself, as anyone can make their own systems and spare parts. 3D printing’s rise, as a result, also means that major aspects of sanction regimes or weapon embargos might become outdated. Indeed, in a nation where gun sales are effectively banned, British police have already had to deal with 3D printed guns,³⁹ while ISIS used fairly advanced injection molding techniques in making its own drones.

With so much change, it is too early to know all that will shake out from these new technologies. But we can identify a few key trends of what will matter for war and beyond, and resulting questions that future counter-insurgents will likely have to wrestle with.

A common theme through these diverse technology areas is that they are neither inherently military nor civilian. Both the people and organizations that research and develop these technologies and those that buy and use them will be both government and civilian. They will be applied to conflict, but also areas that range from business to family life. A related attribute is that they are less likely to require massive logistics systems to deploy, while the trend of greater machine intelligence means that they will also be easier to learn and use—not requiring large training or acquisitions programs. These factors mean that insurgent groups will be able to make far more rapid gains in technology and capability than previously possible.

In short, the game-changing technologies of tomorrow are most likely to have incredibly low barriers to entry, which means they will be proliferated. In addition, some of the technologies, such as 3D printing, will make it difficult to prevent the spread of capability via traditional non-proliferation approaches such as arms embargos and blockades. Interdicting weapons routes is less workable in a world where manufacturing can be done on site.

This issue is not one merely of the hardware, but also the spread of ideas. As vexing as the extent of terrorist ideology and “how to’s” have been in a world of social media, these platforms are still centrally controlled. The Twitters and Facebooks of the world can take down content when they are persuaded of the legal or public relations need. However, the move toward decentralized applications reduces this power, as there is no one place to appeal for censorship.⁴⁰ This phenomenon is well beyond just the problem of a YouTube clip showing how to build an IED, or a cleric inspiring a watcher of a linked video to become a suicide bomber. It is that decentralization crossed with crowd-sourcing and open sourcing empowers anyone on the network to new scales. Indeed, there are already open-source projects like Tensorflow,⁴¹ where any actor can tap into AI resources that were science fiction just a decade ago.

Key Resulting Questions:

• How will U.S. and allied forces prepare for insurgent adversaries that have access to many of the very same technologies and capabilities that they previously relied upon for an edge?
• Will lower barriers to entry make it easier for insurgencies to gain the capability needed to rise? Will it make it more difficult to defeat them if they can rapidly recreate capability?

Whether it was the Marines battling the rebel forces in Haiti with the earliest of close air support missions a century ago to the Marines battling the Taliban today, counterinsurgents of the last 100 years have enjoyed a crucial advantage. When it came to the various domains of war, the state actor alone had the ability to bring true power to bear across domains. In enjoying unfettered access to the air and sea, they could operate more effectively on the land, not just by conducting surveillance and strikes that prevented insurgents from effectively massing forces, but by crucially moving their own forces to almost anywhere they wanted to go.

This monopolization of power may not be the case in the future. Indeed, ISIS has already been able to utilize the air domain (via a self-made air force of drones) to conduct ISR of U.S. and allied forces, as well as several hundred air strikes.⁴² It may be ad hoc, but it still achieved their goals at a minimal cost. More importantly, the ISIS drone use points to a change in the overall story of air power and insurgency. Now, as exemplified everywhere from Yemen to Ukraine, the insurgents can fly and fight back.⁴³

This ability to cross domains is, of course, not just limited to air power, but also other new domains that technology is opening up to battle. Insurgencies will be able to tap into the global network of satellites that have given U.S. forces such advantage in ISR and communications, or even potentially be able to launch and operate cheap micro satellites, either via proxy aid or on their own (If college students can do it already,⁴⁴ why not insurgents?).

More importantly, the “cyber war” side of insurgency will likely move well past what has been experienced so far.⁴⁵ The proliferation of capability through both dark markets and increasing automation, combined with the change in the internet’s form to more and more “things” operating online, points to insurgents being able to target command and control networks and even use Stuxnet-style digital weapons causing physical damage.⁴⁶

The ability to operate across domains also means that insurgents will be able to overcome the tyranny of distance. Once-secure bases and even a force’s distant homeland will become observable, targetable, and reachable, whether by malware or unmanned aerial systems delivering packages of a different sort. To think of it a different way, a future insurgency may not see a Tet-style offensive attack in Hue, but rather Houston.

Key Resulting Questions:

1. Is the U.S. prepared for multi-domain warfare, not just against peer states but also insurgents?
2. What capabilities utilized in counterinsurgency today might not be available in 2030?
3. Just as U.S. forces used capability in one domain to win battles in another, how might insurgents do so?

In the final battles of World War II’s European theater, U.S. forces had to contend with an adversary that brought better technology to the fight. Fortunately for the Allies, the German “wonder weapons” of everything from rockets and jets to assault rifles entered the war too little and too late.

For the last 75 years, U.S. defense planning has focused on making sure that never happened again. Having a qualitative technology edge to "overmatch" our adversaries became baked into everything from our overall defense strategy to small-unit tactics. It is how the U.S. military deterred the Red Army in the Cold War despite having a much smaller military, and how it was able to invade Iraq with a force one-third the size of Saddam Hussein's (inverting the historic mantra that the attacker's force should be three times the size of the defender's).⁴⁷

Even in painful insurgencies from Vietnam to the post-9-11 wars, this approach didn't always deliver easy victories, but it did become part of a changed worldview. A Marine officer once told me that if his unit of 30 men was attacked by 100 Taliban, he would have no fear that his unit might lose; indeed, he described how it would almost be a relief to face the foe in a stand-up fight, as opposed to the fruitless hunts, hidden ambushes and roadside bombs of insurgency. The reason wasn’t just his force’s training, but that in any battle, his side alone could call down systems of technology that the insurgency couldn’t dream of having, from pinpoint targeting of unmanned aerial systems controlled via satellite from thousands of miles away to hundreds of GPS-guided bombs dropped by high speed jet aircraft able to operate with impunity.

Yet U.S. forces can't count on that overmatch in the future. This is not just the issue of mass proliferation discussed above, driven by the lower barriers to entry and availability of key tech on the marketplace. Our future counterinsurgency thinking must also recognize that the geopolitical position has changed. As challenging as the Taliban and ISIS have been, they were not supported by a comparable peer state power, developing its own game-changing technology, and potentially supplying it to the world.

Mass campaigns of state-linked intellectual property theft have meant we are paying much of the research and development costs of China’s weapons development, while at the same time, it is investing in becoming a world leader in each of the above revolutionary technology clusters.⁴⁸ For instance, in the field of AI, China has a dedicated national strategy to become the world leader in AI by the year 2030,⁴⁹ with a massive array of planning and activity to achieve that goal. Meanwhile, it has displayed novel weapons programs in areas that range from space to armed robotics.⁵⁰

The result is that in a future insurgency, whether from purchases off the global market or proxy warfare supplies, American soldiers could face the same kind of shock that the Soviet helicopter pilots had in their 1980s war in Afghanistan, when the Stinger missile showed up in the hands of the mujahideen. The United States could one day find itself fighting a guerilla force that brings better technology to the fight.

Key Resulting Questions:

• What changes in tactics are needed for counterinsurgents when they do not enjoy technology “over-match?”
• How does the growing geopolitical environment shift counterinsurgency? Are U.S. tactics and doctrine ready for great power supported insurgents?

“It is like sipping from a fire hose.”

This is how a U.S. military officer described to me a core problem in their job. The setting was the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Force Base, where U.S. forces coordinated the massive scale of operations in support of counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The challenge they felt was that there was too much data coming at them, from full motion video to chatroom posts, sent in by people ranging from soldiers in the midst of a firefight to intelligence analysts back in the United States. It was not just that the officer could barely keep up, but also that, in constantly servicing their in-box, it was hard to think and act strategically. In essence, their relationship to information was one that we all feel: TMI, Too Much Information.

Some believe that mastering this problem actually holds the solution to ending insurgency as a phenomenon once and for all. In a world of mass surveillance, follows this thinking, if we can just sift through the information rapidly enough, insurgents will not be able to operate effectively. AI algorithms won’t just instantly identify insurgents via face recognition⁵¹ or gait detection analysis,⁵² but even move to predict their activities before they plan them. Indeed, projects like PreData⁵³ already mine open source intelligence like social media posts to predict the very outbreak of insurgencies.

We shouldn’t be so quick to declare victory against rebels of the future. Insurgency, like all conflict, involves a thinking adversary reacting to each and every move and technology. For instance, we are already seeing the rise of counters to mass surveillance like face paints⁵⁴ and even stealth clothing.⁵⁵ In turn, the spread of autonomous drones and cars will render whole swaths of current counterterrorism/insurgency defenses obsolete.

But the counters may be about more than merely deceiving sensors, but altering our very relationship with information itself.

The technology systems that we rely on for counterinsurgency are only as reliable as the information that goes into them. The connection points of this information can be attacked. The communications signals to drones have already been blocked and manipulated in tests, while merchant ships in the Black Sea off Russia experienced a suspected hack where their GPS started to tell the ship captains they were sailing miles inland.⁵⁶

In these situations, it was self-evident that the “spigot” of information was being cut off or tampered with. But what also bodes is a kind of poison to the overall system, targeting the people behind the networks.

“Terrorism is theater,” declared RAND Corporation analyst Brian Jenkins in a 1974 report that became one of the field’s foundational studies.⁵⁷ Command enough attention, and it didn’t matter how weak or strong you were: you could bend populations to your will and cow the most powerful adversaries into submission. This simple principle has guided insurgents and terrorists for millennia. Whether via assassination in the town squares of ancient Judea, marketplace bombings in colonial wars in Algeria, or ISIS’s carefully edited beheadings in Syria, the goal has always been the same: Control what people thought (and feared).

Already we have seen the power of online networks to control this crucial narrative, perhaps most illustratively with the invasion of Mosul, where an insurgent force didn’t hide from, but embraced surveillance. Indeed, ISIS even branded its 2014 offensive #AllEyesOnISIS to ensure that the world was watching. It was effective, but again, quite basic. We can increasingly place false information that is overwhelming for not just our political systems, but our very human senses.

One vector of this is bots—algorithms that perform automated tasks, such as acting like humans online. The early versions of social media bots proved able to drive what people thought, knew, and even argued about during the most crucial elections of our time from their massive presence during the Brexit referendum (researchers found approximately 20 percent of the users shaping online discussion on Britain leaving the European Union were actually bots) to the 2016 U.S. presidential election (Twitter concluded that bots helped drive Russian-generated propaganda to users 454.7 million times).⁵⁸ Years later, the similar use of artificial accounts would strike not just in elections like in Mexico’s, but also in controversies ranging from the Colin Kaepernick NFL boycott to the spread of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.⁵⁹

Artificial intelligence, again available to all actors, is set to massively compound this problem with the creation of what are known as “deep fakes.” Artificial neural networks mimic how the human brain works by having individual nodes that activate or not to a single point of information and carry out incredibly complex tasks by layering the connections together. Through this, machines now can study a database of images, words, and sounds to learn to mimic a human speaker’s face and voice almost perfectly. An early example of the potential political impact of this came in the creation of an eerily accurate, entirely fake conversation between Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump.⁶⁰ Indeed, only drawing from the data of two-dimensional photographs, these systems can build photorealistic, three-dimensional models of someone’s face to place into online settings. A demonstration with the late boxing legend Muhammad Ali transformed a single picture into “photorealistic facial texture inference” that was essentially able to rewrite what “the greatest” actually did and said when he was alive, at least in our online records of him (which will be the source of “truth” to the vast majority).⁶¹

Neural networks can also be used to create deep fakes that aren’t copies at all. Rather than study images to learn the names of different objects, these networks learn how to produce new, never-before-seen versions of the objects in question. These are called “generative networks.”⁶² As an example, computer scientists unveiled a generative network that could create photorealistic synthetic images on demand, all with only a keyword. Ask for “volcano,” and you got fiery eruptions as well as serene, dormant mountains—wholly familiar-seeming landscapes that had no earthly counterparts. Another system created faces of people who didn’t exist but which real humans would likely view as being Hollywood movie stars.⁶³

With such technology, users will eventually be able to conjure a convincing likeness of any scene or person they can imagine. Because the image will be truly original, it will be difficult to identify the forgery via many of the old methods of detection. And such networks can do the same thing with video to create new moments in time that never happened.⁶⁴ They have produced eerie, looping clips of a “beach,” a “baby,” or even “golf.” They’ve also learned how to take a static image (a man on a field; a train in the station) and generate a short video of a predictive future (the man walking away; the train departing). In this way, events that never took place may nonetheless be presented online as real occurrences, documented with compelling video evidence.

Finally, there are neural network-trained chatbots—also known as machine-driven communications tools or MADCOMs.⁶⁵ The inherent promise of such technology—an AI that is essentially indistinguishable from a human operator—is being built to help companies replace their help desks and sell products online. But it also could be utilized for terrible misuse. Today, it still remains possible for a savvy internet user to distinguish “real” people from automated botnets and even many sockpuppets (the combination of Russophied English and a love for red #MAGA hats often gives them away). Soon enough, even this uncertain state of affairs may be recalled fondly as the “good old days”—the last time it was possible to have some confidence that another social media user was a flesh-and-blood human being instead of a manipulative machine.

Combine all these pernicious applications of neural networks—mimicked voices, stolen faces, real-time audiovisual editing, artificial image and video generation, and MADCOM manipulation—and it’s tough to shake the conclusion that the long feared “Cyberwar” of hacking networks will prove less important than what one might think of as the “LikeWar” side of battle: hacking the people on the networks by driving ideas viral through a mix of likes, shares, and lies.⁶⁶

The likely outcome is that the insurgencies of 2030 won’t just be fought by people, but also by highly intelligent, inscrutable algorithms that will speak convincingly of things that never happened and produce “proof” that doesn’t really exist. They’ll seed falsehoods across the social media landscape with an intensity and volume that will make the current state of affairs look quaint.

For instance, as futuristic as the counterinsurgency training on the SMEIR at Fort Polk that opened this report seems, it captures a point in time soon to be passed by technology and tactics. Thwarted by the eagle-eyed U.S. Army tactical operations officer, the terrorists might not just fade back into the crowd. They might instead shoot the civilians anyway and simply manufacture compelling online evidence of U.S. involvement. Or, maybe they never even show up in the first place, able manufacture everything about the massacre using neural networks that would produce hyper-realistic imagery, distribute information outwards with armies of AI-infused bots, and manipulate the algorithms of the web itself. In turn, the role of that officer might be replaced by the only entity able to effectively battle back: another artificial intelligence. The result will be algorithms battling over the hearts and minds of humans.

The result will be algorithms battling over the hearts and minds of humans.

It is easy to downplay the effects of these online battles, but to do so ignores how the age-old lessons of counterinsurgency are likely to cross with the new features of LikeWar. As General Stanley McChrystal told a conference of military officers in the Middle East, “…For the foreseeable future,” the online space of social media will be as crucial of a domain to any war as that of the air, land, or sea. The reason, he explains, is that “There is a war on reality…Shaping the perception of which side is right or which side is winning will be more important than actually which side is right or winning."⁶⁷

Key Resulting Questions:

• What aspects of our relationship to information itself will change in future insurgencies?
• What will the LikeWar battles between insurgents and counterinsurgents look like in the future? Are we prepared to fight and win them? How will we even know?

The most powerful evidence that we are in a time of historic change is that the trends that are in play in technology, and their resulting effects on the world, are so diverse that they can be a bit overwhelming. Their challenge is not merely that they ripple out in so many different directions, but that we are simply not in a position yet to answer many of the questions that they raise, especially for a realm so prone to uncertainty as war. But that is okay to admit. As Werner Herzog sagely put it, "Sometimes a deep question is better than a straight answer.”⁶⁸

In such a time of massive change, those that choose to stand still, ignore the trends, and not adjust appropriately, are making a choice with their inaction.

Yet, in all this uncertainty, there is one key takeaway lesson that this survey of the technology and its potential effect on counterinsurgency does seem to provide: In such a time of massive change, those that choose to stand still, ignore the trends, and not adjust appropriately, are making a choice with their inaction. They are choosing to lose the wars of tomorrow.